In recent times, one of the most
talked about and very easily misunderstood term in the HCM world is Employee
Engagement. There are technology vendors who talk of importance of Employee
Engagement and how their products enhance or facilitate better engagement. And
there is the eco-system of analysts, observers, writers and bloggers like me
who talk of Employee Engagement and how it impacts / facilitates an
organization in its quest to excel in the market place.
How do you measure employee engagement?
It is important to think of what
is employee engagement in terms of “outcome”. The engagement is actually the
result of experience of employee(s), and this engagement drives certain
outcomes in the organization’s collective performance. As a result, the
engagement itself is an outcome of employee experiences in an organization. Now
this does not end there.
The Positivity or Negativity of these engagements
drive outcome in other aspects of employees’ interactions with the
organizations – it may be in setting and achieving goals, it may be in
compliance, it may be in continuous voluntary upskilling etc.
One of the easiest and foremost
measure of engagement that HR leaders can use is Employee Referrals. If you can
measure the percentage of Hires that are coming through Employee Referrals, it
gives you an indication on the influence your network (your employees) has on
the extended network (your employees’ networks).
The higher the percentage, you reasonably
assume that the employee engagement is higher. However, you need to remember
that this is only one measure that is easiest and available to you without any
surveys or complex modelling. An organization still needs to measure other
parameters and look to improve the employee engagement holistically.
Employee Referrals as the
percentage of overall Hires can be used as an immediate metric to measure an
organization’s Employee Engagement parameter before and after engagement
interventions. This can also be used as a signal that shows that Engagement
interventions are necessary.
But then you also need to look at another
dimension of this parameter. What is the duration of “stay” of these Referrals.
